The premise of each episode is to examine a number of MUFON cases, looking for patterns that tie in to historic UFO events and try to show what the alien agenda may be. Actual footage and recreations will be used along with expert testimony. The “HANGAR 1” title comes from the actual Hangar One where the vast archive of 75,000 MUFON cases and evidence are stored, including the Leonard Stringfield files. The show will showcase MUFON’s mission to educate the public about the UFO phenomenon.

UFO investigators, researchers, and journalists present case details in the show, while event recreations help the viewer to better visualize the cases as they are described. Hangar 1 features MUFON’s Pennsylvania state director John Ventre, MUFON STAR Team investigator Jeremy Ray, and Jason McClellan of Open Minds. Richard Dolan, Grant Cameron, Leslie Kean, Michael Schratt, and MUFON’s executive director Jan Harzan make appearances in the series as well.

Hangar 1: The UFO Files premieres on History’s H2 channel at 10:00 p.m. Eastern on Friday, February 28 following a new episode of the popular program Ancient Aliens. H2 provides the following description of Hangar 1‘s premiere episode:

From Truman to Obama, our modern day Presidents have all had rich and controversial histories with UFOs and extraterrestrials. In fact, Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, and Reagan are each rumored to have had personal encounters. Inside HANGAR 1, MUFON files ask, “What do our presidents really know about the existence of UFOs?” Are some Presidents kept in the dark because they aren’t trusted with that knowledge and how they might use it? Or, are they all aware, but the secrets are too dark and deep that full disclosure becomes a risk they just can’t take?

Following the premiere, this eight-episode series will continue to air new episodes every Friday.

Marble portrait of Alexander the Great, 2nd-1st century BC (Credit: The British Museum)

Ever since the well known radio broadcaster, author and ufologist Frank Edwards published it in his book Stranger Than Science, the story of a UFO incident during the military campaigns of Alexander the Great has been repeated endless times in books, articles, TV programs and the web. Its latest incarnation appears in the just released book, UFOs in Wartime – What They Didn’t Want You to Know (Berkley Books) by Mack Maloney. It’s understandable than Maloney included this case since Alexander the Great (356-323 BC) is one of the most successful and iconic military commanders of all times. Unfortunately, Maloney didn’t do any research on this particular story, limiting himself to paraphrasing the Edwards account and a second story where “flying shields” supposedly helped Alexander’s army to conquer the city of Tyre in modern-day Lebanon.

Despite the many repetitions of Alexander’s UFO story, there are only two modern versions of it and neither one provides historical references or sources. All efforts by various historians and researchers to find ancient sources have failed so far. Before mentioning these efforts by Jacques Vallee and others, let’s see first what was supposed to have happened. The first version published originally by Frank Edwards in 1959 is very brief. It comes at the end of his book in Chapter 72, “Spies in the Skies.” Edwards wrote:

Alexander the Great was not the first to see them nor was he the first to find them troublesome. He tells of two strange craft that dived repeatedly at his army until the war elephants, the men, and the horses all panicked and refused to cross the river where the incident occurred. What did the things look like? His historian describes them as great shining silvery shields, spitting fire around the rims… things that came from the skies and returned to the skies.

The second version was published in 1966 by Alberto Fenoglio in the Italian ufological publication Clypeus (issue #9, 1st Semester 1966) in an article titled, “Cronoistoria su oggetti volanti del passato – Apunti per una clipeostoria” (Chronological History of Flying Objects in the Past – Notes for a History of Shields). Fenoglio’s account, which like Edwards didn’t cite any historical sources, was in turn translated and published by the English ancient astronaut author Raymond Drake in his 1967 Gods and Spacemen in Greece and Rome (recently reprinted by Tim Beckley’s Global Communications as Alien Space Gods of Ancient Greece and Rome). After repeating the Edwards account, Drake goes on to say that Fenoglio based his version on the 19th century historian Johann Gustav Droysen, revealing the following startling information during the Macedonian siege of Tyre on 332 BC:

The fortress would not yield, its walls were fifty feet high and constructed so solidly that no siege-engine was able to damage it. The Tyrians disposed of the greatest technicians and builders of war-machines of the time and they intercepted in the air the incendiary arrows and projectiles hurled by the catapults on the city.

One day suddenly there appeared over the Macedonian camp these “flying shields”, as they had been called, which flew in triangular formation led by an exceedingly large one, the others were smaller by almost a half. In all there were five. The unknown chronicler narrates that they circled slowly over Tyre while thousands of warriors on both sides stood and watched them in astonishment. Suddenly from the largest “shield” came a lightning-flash that struck the walls, these crumbled, other flashes followed and walls and towers dissolved, as if they had been built of mud, leaving the way open for the besiegers who poured like an avalanche through the breeches. The “flying shields” hovered over the city until it was completely stormed then they very swiftly disappeared aloft, soon melting into the blue sky.

Detail of the Alexander Sarcophagus in the Istanbul Archaeology Museum, showing Alexander fighting the Persians at the Battle of Issus. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Unverified account

There is a rather modern tone in this account by Fenoglio, reminiscent of contemporary UFO stories, with phrases like the objects “flew in triangular formation” and “hovered over the city until it was completely stormed.” If this was a true story and the “flying shields” played such a decisive role in a key battle, one would expect to find it mentioned by Plutarch, Quintus Curtius and all the other historians of Antiquity who wrote extensively about Alexander the Great, and yet none have been found. I looked at French translations of Droysen’s German biography of Alexander, where he described the siege of Tyre in detail. Needless to say, the flying shields and lightning-bolts are not there. He describes how the Greek army bombarded the walls heavily with catapults until a part of it finally collapsed. Moreover, I later found a more complete translation of Fenoglio’s Clypeus article where he writes that, “during the siege of Tyre in the year 332 BC, strange flying objects were observed. Johann Gustav Droysen in his History of Alexander the Great [Geschichte Alexanders des Grossen (1833)] does not cite it intentionally, believing it to be a fantasy of the Macedonian soldiers.” So Drake misunderstood completely the Droysen reference or else translated a distorted version of the original article, but either way the Fenoglio story lacks any valid ancient or modern sources.

Cover of the book Wonders in the Sky by Vallee and Aubeck, showing an artist’s rendition of Alexander’s silver shields. (Credit: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin)

All the researchers who have spent some time with this story have come up empty-handed so far. Gordon Creighton, the longtime scholarly editor of Britain’s Flying Saucer Review wrote in 1970 that, “so far I have seen no indication as to which classical author is responsible for it,” and “I hope if there is a Greek or Latin text somebody can tell me where to find it.” The Swiss ufologist Bruno Mancusi looked into it with the Macedonian historian Aleksander Donski, concluding a 2003 post in UFO Updates that “this story remains very dubious.” Jacques Vallee and Chris Aubeck reached the same conclusion in their recent important book, Wonders in the Sky – Unexplained Aerial Objects from Antiquity to Modern Times (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin), where they even put Alexander’s “silver shields” battle scene on the cover. The story of the Tyre siege, however, was relegated to the “Part II: Myths, Legends, and Chariots of the Gods” in their catalog of historical UFO cases. The authors first questioned the idea that there were two incidents (river and siege) involving Alexander rather than one. They also pointed out that Fenoglio was an unreliable source who had invented or embellished several ancient stories. To say, as put by Edwards, that “his historian” had described the “flying shields” is a moot point because the Deeds of Alexander written by Callisthenes (who accompanied the Macedonian King in his campaigns and wrote the official history of them) is lost. Some excerpts were quoted by later Greek and Roman historians but none cited the “flying shields.” For all these reasons, Vallee and Aubeck conclude: “Until some original source can be located, we are left with the suggestion that Alexander’s army at Tyre simply witnessed fiery projectiles, some sort of flaming weapon.”

By far the most thorough analysis of this case was made by historian Yannis Deliyannis in his excellent website “Chronicom Mirabilium – A historian’s look on ancient anomalous celestial phenomena and mysterious history,” specifically on his piece, “Did Alexander the Great really see UFOs?” posted in November 2009. After going over the same material by Edwards and Fenoglio discussed already, Deliyannis made an honest effort to find some sources to the legend. He discovered that the classical historian Quintus Curtius Rufus wrote the following in his Historia Alexandri Magni (lib. IV, cap. V):

Furthermore, they [the Tyrians] would heat bronze shields in a blazing fire, fill them with hot sand and boiling excrement and suddenly hurl them from the walls. None of their deterrents aroused greater fear than this. The hot sand would make its way between the breastplate and the body; there was no way to shake it out and it would burn through whatever it touched. The soldiers would throw away their weapons, tear off all their protective clothing and thus expose themselves to wounds without being able to retaliate.
(From Heckel, W. and Yardley, J. Alexander the Great: historical texts in translation, 2004, p. 147)

“This is as close as we can get to Fenoglio’s ‘flying shields’ by looking at ancient sources,” commented Deliyannis, “and I believe this passage from Quintus Curtius is the basis Fenoglio used for his version, whether intentionally or as a result of a (hard-to-believe) misunderstanding or mistranslation.” As for the description of “silvery shields,” Deliyannis points out that an elite unit of Alexander’s army known as the Hypaspists changed their name at the beginning of the campaign in India to Argyraspides, which means “silver shields” because they decorated their shields with silver, so that could be another source of confusion for modern writers like Edwards, Drake and Fenoglio.

The Alexander Romance

A naval action during the siege of Tire in 332 BC by the 19th century artist André Castaigne (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Deliyannis also mentions another possible source—the literary genre known as the Alexander Romance, which reached extraordinary popularity in medieval times. It was basically a fantastic version of Alexander’s campaigns which started in the waning years of the Roman Empire with a writer known as the Pseudo-Calisthenes, to distinguish him from the official historian Calisthenes. Another apocryphal document that contributed to the Romance was the so-called Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, “a fake, probably composed in the 4th or 5th century AD” that “was extremely famous during the middle ages and was eventually inserted in the Pseudo-Calisthenes,” according to Deliyannis.

The personality of Alexander the Great was already larger than life even in his own lifetime. There were rumors that he was not the son of King Philip II of Macedon, but that the chief god Zeus had seduced his mother Queen Olympias (played by Angelina Jolie in the Oliver Stone movie), thus becoming a semi-god. This rumor was probably used as propaganda to discourage any resistance to his invasions. In just 12 years, Alexander changed completely the ancient world, conquering the mighty Persian Empire and pushing all the way to India in the east and Egypt to the west. Many cities still bear his name, such as Alexandria in Egypt and Kandahar (from his name in Persian, Iskandar) in Afghanistan. Although his empire was divided among his main generals after his death in Babylon in 323 BC at the age of 32, the era of Hellenic civilization spread through the Mediterranean and beyond, symbolized by the famous Library of Alexandria.

Although the known facts about Alexander the Great were fantastic enough, the Pseudo-Calisthenes and a series of Byzantine, Armenian, Arab and European variants developed through the Middle Ages converted the “Alexander Romance” into a kind of medieval science-fiction. There are dozens of variants—some of the more famous are the 15th century French illuminated manuscript, La Vraye Histoire du Bon Roy Alixandre (The True Story of the Good King Alexander), now in the British Library, and the Spanish epic Libro de Alexandre (Book of Alexander), written between 1178 ad 1250 AD. Many of these versions are magnificently illustrated. Among other fantastic deeds of the Alexander Romance, the Macedonian hero built a wall in Asia confining the armies of Gog and Magog, which will not be unleashed until the end of times; reached Eden or the primeval Paradise of Adam and Eve; flew in the sky in a chariot propelled by griffins and descended to the bottom of the ocean in a barrel-shaped submarine; fought and killed dragons and many other exotic monsters; encountered all kinds of strange creatures including the fabled Amazons, a bigfoot-type Wildman, and the legendary headless beings known in Antiquity as Blemmyes, who had eyes and mouth on their chests.

Illuminated manuscript from the XV century showing Alexander the Great’s diving bell submarine. (Credit: British Library)

Alexander encounter the Wildman in his voyage to Asia, from a medieval manuscript of the Alexander Romance. (Credit: Biliothèque nationale de France)

One of the most delightful stories of the Alexander Romance is the King’s flying chariot pushed by griffins, which exhibits the most quaint propulsion system ever devised in literature. According to the various versions of the Romance, Alexander had captured two griffins during his campaign in India. He built a cage for one man to stand up and kept the animals without eating for three days, so they would be really hungry. He then tied the griffins to the cage and put a big piece of meat on top of a spear, dangling the meat in front of the griffins. “Trying to grab it, the griffins kept flying,” says the Libro de Alexandre. This scene was particularly popular with medieval illustrators, and so was another science-fiction type episode of his descent into the bottom of the ocean in a barrel-shaped submarine, which is mentioned in a famous letter on future inventions by Friar Roger Bacon, one of the wisest men of the Middle Ages. In this letter written c. 1260, Bacon wrote:

A machine can be constructed for submarine journeys, for seas and rivers. It dives to the bottom without danger to man. Alexander the Great has made use of such a device, as we know from Ethicus the astronomer. Such things have been made long ago and they are still made in our days, except perhaps the flying machine…

It is clear that the many exploits of the Alexander Romance are fanciful and not factual, although they deserve a spot in the history of science-fiction. The historian Yannis Deliyannis found a “celestial prodigy” in the so-called Letter to Aristotle worth citing:

Immediately after that the sky grew very black and dark, and from the dark sky there came burning fire. The fire fell to the earth like a burning torch, and the whole plain was burning from the fire’s flame. Then men said that they thought it was the anger of the gods which had fallen upon us. Then I ordered old clothing to be torn up and used as a protection against the fire. After that we had a quiet and peaceful night, once our difficulties assuaged.
(Orchard, Andy. Pride and Prodigies: Studies in the Monsters of the Beowulf Manuscript, Cambridge, 1995, p. 245)

Deliyannis points out that this account is not as fantastic as the one described by Edwards and, in any case, “the historiographical value of the documents belonging to the Romance of Alexander” are not reliable. He concludes his thorough study of Alexander’s alleged UFO incidents by pointing out the amusing fact that “the aforementioned UFO writers have somewhat become the spiritual continuators of the tradition of the Alexander Romance in our century, still adding marvelous events to it, as had done before them their medieval predecessors…”

We have to agree with Deliyannis. Until ufologists and ancient astronaut writers find legitimate historical accounts that back up the alleged UFO incidents of Alexander the Great, the story should not be repeated as factual.

The publication of the novel Los Círculos de los Dioses (The Circles of the Gods) by Guadalupe Rivera Marín earlier this year, which deals with the presence of extraterrestrials in Mexico’s ancient history, has caused quite a stir in Mexican intellectual circles. Perhaps this is not due so much with the subject matter itself—UFOs, after all, have been a regular feature in the Mexican media for many years—but because of the author’s high profile and longstanding prestigious career in politics, academia and culture.

Born in 1924, Guadalupe Rivera Marín is one of the daughters of Diego Rivera (1886-1957), the most famous of the Mexican muralists, and his second wife Guadalupe Marín (portrayed by actress Valeria Golino in the 2002 popular movie Frida, where Salma Hayek plays the main role of Rivera’s third wife and well known painter Frida Kahlo, and Alfred Molina that of Diego Rivera). Guadalupe Rivera graduated as a lawyer at UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico), one of the country’s most prestigious educational institutions, where she also studied public administration, economy and international relations. She has a long career in government, including many high-level cabinet posts, Ambassador of Mexico to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Rome, Economic Advisor to the Presidency, delegate to various international conferences, etc. A member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) since 1960, she served several terms both as Deputy (Congresswoman) and Senator in Mexico’s Congress. Guadalupe Rivera was also a law professor at UNAM and serves currently as president of the Diego Rivera Foundation. She published several books on legal and economic issues, memoirs dealing with her famous father and more recently, fiction.

The famous Mexican muralist and painter Diego Rivera

The Circles of the Gods is the first installment in a trilogy and her first novel. The publisher’s (Plaza y Janes) blurb describes it in the following words: “The text is the result of investigations undertaken for many years in what the author calls ‘history-fiction,’ [combining] historical and archaeological data, pre-Hispanic mythology and popular legends, real and imaginary characters. Starting with a concrete enigma, its goal is to decipher the most remote origins of the Mexicans. The work is part of a trilogy that describes who were the extraterrestrial gods, from where they came and how they arrived to this planet, as well as explaining why they chose the Mexican territory to plant their seeds and watch them secretly throughout the centuries.”

The novel begins with the story of Pedro Raygadas, a young member of a wealthy family in Querétaro, who is gravely wounded during the Cristero War in the late 1920s. (The Cristero War was a Catholic rebellion against the secular PRI government formed after the Mexican Revolution.) Raygadas is rescued by an Indian princess, with whom she has a son, Vicente. However, Raygadas must escape to Europe when the Indians blame him for the death of the girl during childbirth. Later on, Pedro explores a mercury mine that he inherited from his family and finds a mysterious cave known as “Cueva del Dios Viejo” (Cave of the Old God). “Among the Indians there is a legend,” continues the publisher’s description of the book, “that this is a very dangerous place because that’s where the Tizimines go.” The Tizimines are “evil witches that become balls of fire and fly over the air.” From these “balls of fire” a plot emerges which takes you to the “feathered serpent” Quetzalcoatl, the Christ-like figure who brought civilization to the ancient Mesoamerican peoples and the flying saucers so popular in today’s Mexico. The trilogy will continue with the second volume to be published at the end of this year, La sabiduría de los dioses (The Wisdom of the Gods), where Pedro Raygadas, now an anthropologist, studies the phenomenon with a scientific basis; and Los orígenes (The Origins), to come out in 2011, which will explain the place of origin of the extraterrestrials.

IT ALL STARTED WITH HER OWN SIGHTING

Cover of the novel The Circles of the Gods (image credit: Plaza y Janes)

In several interviews given to various Mexican newspapers and media, Guadalupe Rivera explained that the first spark of her interest in this kind of phenomena began with a personal experience in the 1970s when she was traveling in a vehicle in the area of Sierra Gorda of Querétaro in her capacity as director of the Federal District’s Economic Programs and Studies. In an interview with journalist Angel Vargas published in La Jornada, Rivera explained that, “as we passed a village called Vizarrón de Montes, the vehicle stopped and all the lights in the area went off. At that very moment what seemed like a craft passed over us; the locals know these as ‘red balls’ or ‘tzinziniles’ in the Otomi language.” Similar phenomena have also been reported in Guanajuato and so it’s believed that “they travel from the Gulf of Mexico to the sierra.” She added that many years earlier, in 1921, her own father Diego Rivera and another famous Mexican painter, David Alfaro Siqueiros, had seen a similar object as they returned from Europe in an ocean liner.

Her experience in the Sierra Gorda sparked her interest to research further the significance of the so-called tzinziniles or Tizimines in Mexican folklore and mythology. “We were powerful and cultivated nations that disappeared with the flood,” she said. “The Popol Vuh is nothing else than the narrative of how the earth was recovered after the flood. However, I always thought that this must be linked to a spacecraft. Later, I thought in the feathered serpent [Quetzalcoatl].” The Popol Vuh is a collection of Maya creation stories and myths first rendered in Spanish, from older Quiché sources, around 1714 by the Dominican priest Father Ximénez. Guadalupe Rivera mentioned that in this book there is the story of a god that came and stood over the waters and his green and red feathers illuminated the waters. “Those who came from it,” she added, “could move mountains, dry rivers and return to Earth the capacity of allowing the plants to grow.” She surmised that all this must have been done by space aliens since humans would have not been able to accomplish such a job.

Rivera’s earlier research was published in the late seventies not as fiction but as a series of articles for Contactos Extaterrestres, a good quality newsstand magazine then published in Mexico by Editorial Posada. I have some issues of this magazine in my files and was actually able to locate some of her articles, which are in the vein of the ancient astronaut or paleocontact theory popularized in the works of Erich von Däniken, Zecharia Sitchin and others. One of her articles is titled, “Cosmic Origin of Indian Festivals” (CE, Vol. II, No. 11, 1977). “In our concept,” she wrote in this article, “one way of doing American astro-archaeology is to search in engravings, paintings, bas-reliefs in the monuments, pottery and tombs, in the monoliths that fill the museums, in the illustrations from the ancient codices and in the mythological stories and rites that survived the colonial destruction, all those traces that can lead us to know what was the relation between the creation gods and the first humans, and in which ways the memories of an American Golden Age, when gods and men shared the work of generating a new way of life, endured through the ages.”

She goes on to describe in some detail the myth of the flying serpent Gucumatz which stood over the waters in the Popol Vuh and then some Indian ceremonies and festivals, including that of “los Voladores” (the flying men), in which four warriors fly suspended from long ropes mounted on a tall pole, still practiced in Mexico to this day. In other articles for Contactos Extraterrestres published later in 1977, Guadalupe Rivera developed a series titled, “World Mythologies and Current Astro-Archaeology,” where she went beyond Mesoamerica to cover the myths and legends from the Near East, Greece, Polynesia, India, Egypt, etc.

Ritual of “The Flyers” from the 1807 English translation of Father Clavijero’s History of Ancient Mexico.

In her interview with Vargas, the 85-year old Rivera explained some of the reasons that led her to wrote the novel The Circles of the Gods: “I did all this with the idea that Mexicans should know—although nobody seems to want to know—that we are as ancient or more than the Egyptians; we are part of a cultural belt around the world that goes back before the flood.” Vargas asked her if she didn’t fear that people would question her credibility or mental health. “I don’t care,” she answered. “I went to see the neurologist because I heard noises in my head; they did magnetic resonances. When I asked the doctor if I was going crazy, he rsponded that I was perfectly sane. I commented that people might say that I am crazy because of this novel and then he said he would defend me.”

The 84-year old author Guadalupe Rivera holding her book.

Vargas then asked how much of the novel was fiction and how much was fact. “To me it’s all reality,” responded Rivera, “with the exception of those elements that are basic in any novel. There must be characters, love, passion, action. It’s a total invention, for instance, that I placed the story during the Cristero War, or that the protagonists find a spacecraft. But it is true, for example, that one of those colossal Olmec heads exists in the Bucareli mission (in Sierra Gorda), which almost no one knows about.” Vargas finally asked her why she thinks the ET contact was stopped in the past. “Because we betrayed the gods and became avaricious, greedy, arrogant,” she responded. “Instead of utilizing science for the good, we have used it for bad purposes.”

Whether Guadalupe Rivera’s novel becomes a bestseller or has a significant impact in the culture remains to be seen, but the mere fact that a person of her political and cultural background is even discussing the ET presence in our history is already significant enough.